External Expansion Boxes : Four Quiet and Powerful Mini PCs for Intel CPUs

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External Expansion Boxes

12:57 - Thursday 6 July 2006 by Siggy Moersch
Source: Tom's Hardware – Keywords: four, quiet, and, powerful, mini, pcs, for, intel, cpus, uk

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External Expansion Boxes

External hard disk enclosures are always good options when it comes to backing up or transporting lots of files. If there isn't enough room inside a barebones PC for an additional drive, you must either replace the existing drive with a bigger one or attach another drive externally. For the latter approach, you can choose between USB or Firewire, but you can also find relatively new devices that use Serial ATA or eSATA ports as well. Though USB or Firewire can restrict data transfer rates, Serial ATA won't slow things down at all.

Unfortunately, things don't always function entirely properly with the so-called "Hot Plug", which only works properly with SATA II capable devices.

Stardom SR3610: Professional ESATA Solution

A RAID box for two Serial ATA hard disks

It's no longer mandatory to use only USB or Firewire to hook a PC up to external hard disks. There are now enough Serial ATA ports inside most PCs to make some available for external drives as well. One disadvantage of this technology is that each drive requires its own separate SATA port. This also means you can't cascade multiple SATA drives through a single connector the way you can with USB or Firewire.

The Stardom expansion box makes room for two SATA hard disks, both of which must be identical. These drives work either in a RAID 0 or RAID 1 array. In RAID 0 the total capacity is the sum of the two drives, but RAID 1 uses mirroring, so the total capacity is that of only a single drive. But in RAID 1 mode, if either drive fails, it can be replaced in a hot swap manoeuvre without taking the array down. In RAID 0 mode, the loss of a single drive means the loss of all data from both drives. An external LED display reports constantly on storage status. This device may also be attached to a PC through USB instead, but data transfer rates decline by almost 25 MB/s.